Reports from yesterday about the retrial of the men accused of plotting to bomb the Sears Tower has got us thinking about the building we often take for granted. Towering above all the rest (that is, until Donald Trump completes the phallic homage to himself), the Sears Tower anchors our skyline and appears in more photos than we're able to count.

This abstract view of the mammoth structure, taken by Flickr's inetmer, is one of our favorites. What's your favorite shot of the Sears Tower? Send them our way with...

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Reports from yesterday about the retrial of the men accused of plotting to bomb the Sears Tower has got us thinking about the building we often take for granted. Towering above all the rest (that is, until Donald Trump completes the phallic homage to himself), the Sears Tower anchors our skyline and appears in more photos than we're able to count.

This abstract view of the mammoth structure, taken by Flickr's inetmer, is one of our favorites. What's your favorite shot of the Sears Tower? Send them our way with...

" />

Reports from yesterday about the retrial of the men accused of plotting to bomb the Sears Tower has got us thinking about the building we often take for granted. Towering above all the rest (that is, until Donald Trump completes the phallic homage to himself), the Sears Tower anchors our skyline and appears in more photos than we're able to count.

This abstract view of the mammoth structure, taken by Flickr's inetmer, is one of our favorites. What's your favorite shot of the Sears Tower? Send them our way with...

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Photo Contest: Sears Tower Love

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Reports from yesterday about the retrial of the men accused of plotting to bomb the Sears Tower has got us thinking about the building we often take for granted. Towering above all the rest (that is, until Donald Trump completes the phallic homage to himself), the Sears Tower anchors our skyline and appears in more photos than we’re able to count.

This abstract view of the mammoth structure, taken by Flickr’s inetmer, is one of our favorites. What’s your favorite shot of the Sears Tower? Send them our way with…

Housing Bulletin—What Sells Now—and How

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Nobody was especially surprised when the Illinois Association of Realtors (IAR) announced last week that home prices had dropped in January 2008 when compared to prices in January 2007. The drop—2.2 percent in the Chicago area and 5.3 percent for the state of Illinois—was the first year-to-year price drop since at least 1998, when the IAR started tracking that statistic. There was one bright spot…

Sale of the Week—Rumsfeld’s Former Gold Coast Home

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List Price: $1.8 million
Sale Price: $1.75 million
The Property: The ten-room Gold Coast condominium where Donald Rumsfeld lived for 15 years before moving to Washington, D.C., to become Secretary of Defense in 2001 has been resold by the family who bought the place from Rumsfeld and his wife, Joyce. Set on the south end of the third and fourth floors of a handsome early 20th-century brick and limestone building that has just a …

On the Market: A Gold Coast Condo with a Suburban Feel

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List Price: $1,095,000
The Property: The 16-story Elm Tower, at Elm and Dearborn streets, is a six-year-old building designed to look and feel like the vintage co-ops of the Gold Coast. When he was building it, the developer, Jim Letchinger, told me he had grown up in the neighborhood and wanted to put up something that captured the intimate, urban feeling of the 1920s residential buildings he loved there…

Housing Bulletin: An Upgraded Web Site for City and Suburban House Hunters

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Thanks to some cool upgrades that launched last week, Dreamtown.com is now my pick for the most useful and informative Web site in Chicago for shopping for real estate.

Like countless other real-estate sites, Dreamtown provides access to all the properties listed for sale on the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois (MLSNI); offers tips on how to buy and sell in today’s market; and purports to provide tips on how to do a “sale by owner”—while actually making the not-very-subtle pitch that you would much rather go through an agent.

But Dreamtown sets itself apart with…

On the Market—To the Manor Reborn-Winnetka

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List Price: $3,997,000
The Property: In 2002, Marge Johnsson bought this red brick manor house—which had been designed nearly 100 years earlier by the architect Howard Van Doren Shaw—as the freshman rehab project for Magnolia Restorations, the company she was then launching. “I wanted to do it the way Shaw would…

Housing Bulletin—Kerry Wood Takes a Loss

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Kerry Wood has sold his house in Chicago’s Old Town Triangle for $1,201,000. That’s $2,000 more than he was asking at the time it sold, but $94,000 less than he paid for it in 2004—which means the Cubs pitcher took a 7 percent loss on the property.

In October 2004, Wood and his wife, Sarah, paid $1,295,000 for this house on a narrow 19th-century street a few blocks west of Lincoln Park. Built in 1876 (most likely by German immigrants), the seven-room, three-bedroom house has been…

Sale of the Week—A Princely Old Town Rowhouse

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List Price: $1,450,000

Sale Price: $1,325,000
The Property: William Wood Prince, the Chicago philanthropist and executive whose family once controlled the Union Stockyards and the Armour & Co. meat empire, has sold a 19th-century rowhouse in Chicago’s Old Town that he had owned for two decades.

The tall red-brick rowhouse, built in 1886, has classic good looks: a half-hexagon bay rimmed with high, limestone-capped windows stretches up to an overhanging cornice. Inside, the dining room, kitchen, and family room are on the ground floor (where the servants’ workspaces would have originally been), and there is a 450-square-foot living room on the second floor (where the raised front door is). The master suite is on the third floor, and there are three more bedrooms above that…